rai
\ʁɛ\
The verdict
“rai” sits in 20 confusable pairs (corpus #22,057) as a noun. The look-alike neighbours are the real trap.
- #22,057
- frequency rank, French
- 5,742
- “R” headwords
- 20
- confusable pairs
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed September 3, 2026) - Rayon, trait de lumière.
Corpus desk
Index FR-rai · rai · French
rai · rank #22,057 · 0 variants · 20 confusables
- FREQ-MID #22,057
- LEN-MID 3 letters
- VOW-2 2 vowels
- CONFUS-HIGH 20 pairs
- VAR-0 0 variants
- BOOK-DENSE 5,742
- PHOTO-FINISH racailles
Nearest frequency peer: racailles (-1 rank slots)
Desk codes from Wiktionary headword shape, FrequencyWords rank tier, confusable-pair count, generated misspelling depth, letter-cohort book size, and photo-finish peer. Not a difficulty grade.
Voisins de fréquence du confusable « rai »
Pairs de poids proche dans le corpus, séparés des confusables ci-dessous
- péages
péages
77,947 corpus weight
- pétard
pétard
77,946 corpus weight
- racailles
racailles
77,945 corpus weight
- rai
rai
77,944 corpus weight
- Rambouillet
Rambouillet
77,943 corpus weight
- ramenez
ramenez
77,942 corpus weight
What this shows Les barres placent « rai » face aux lemmes français les plus proches par rang, pas un reprint du bureau des confusables.
Visual similarity to commonly confused words
How many letter changes separate each confused pair (Levenshtein distance, normalized).
Source: PlainSpell confusable corpus (Wiktionary, CC BY-SA).
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | rai |
| Language | French |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| IPA | \ʁɛ\ |
| Letters | 3 |
| Frequency rank | #22,057 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 20 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Rang de corpus près des confusables de « rai »
Easy to mix with look-alikes
The spelling risk for rai is neighbouring look-alikes ("Re", "Rh", …), not just typos; it is anoun pronounced \ʁɛ\. Frequency #22,057 among 5,742 “R” headwords. 4 recorded senses keep meaning in play.
No misspelling variants are generated for rai in our index, since its letter pattern doesn't lend itself to common typo substitutions. It also participates in 20 confusable-pair relationships, "Re", "Rh", "RT", and more, since the words sound or look close enough that writers reach for the wrong one mid-sentence.
No documented word history exists for this headword, so its spelling is best explained by sound-to-letter mapping rather than etymology. The correct French form is rai, spelled R-A-I.
Definition
- 1Rayon, trait de lumière.
- 2Pointe d’une étoile.
- 3Chacun des rayons, parties d’une roue qui s’assemblent d’un côté dans le moyeu et de l’autre dans la jante.
- 4Ornement en forme de cœur, propre à la moulure appelée talon.
Recorded use
Wiktionary examplesThese source excerpts show how rai appears in context. They illustrate usage; the definition above remains the entry’s reference meaning.
La porte est ouverte, devant laquelle il faut passer ; un rai de lumière sort de la chambre et coupe le palier de l’escalier.
Le soleil, haut et clair, dardait ses rais de feu sur la campagne cubaine. Mais les hauts palmiers, serrés comme des soldats à l’exercice, interceptaient ses rayons de leurs épais panaches.
This word in other languages
Definitions, pronunciation, and etymology for this entry are drawn from Wiktionary via the kaikki.org structured extract (CC BY-SA); frequency ordering uses the FrequencyWords open word-frequency list (2018 French corpus, MIT). See the methodology for how each field is sourced and updated.
Frequently Asked Questions
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Similar French words by spelling shape
Same letter count and similar misspelling depth for "rai", not the corpus desk frequency band.
Same letter count
Frequency-ranked French headwords with 3 letters (nearest by frequency rank).